Charles Bradlaugh was its chief exponent, and both Mr.Joseph Chamberlain and the late Sir Charles Dilke were regarded as Republicans before they entered Gladstone's Ministry in 1880.

The Republican movement waned before Bradlaugh's death.

He himself was "led to feel that agitation for an ideal form of government was less directly fruitful than agitation against the abuses of class privilege; and in the last dozen years of his life, his political work went mainly to reforms within the lines of the Constitution."[88] With the rise of the Socialist movement in England in 1884-5, and the celebration of the Queen's Jubilee in 1887, Republicanism became utterly moribund, and nothing save an attempt on the part of the sovereign to take a definite side in party politics, or a notorious lapse from the morals required of persons in office of State, could revive it.
The interest in Socialism was fatal to the Republican movement, because it turned the enthusiasm of the active spirits in democratic politics from the desire for radical changes in the _form_ of government, to the crusade for economic changes, and the belief in a coming social revolution.

The existence of monarchy seemed a small and comparatively unimportant affair to men and women who were hoping to get poverty abolished, and the landlords and capitalists expropriated either by direct revolution, or by the act of a House of Commons, dominated by working men with Socialist convictions.
The national celebrations at the Queen's Jubilee in 1887 marked the beginning of the popular revival in pageantry and official ceremonial.

In the Church of England this revival began some forty years earlier, and it has, in our day, changed the whole conduct of public worship.